A revolution in the field of systems thinking—a review of Checkland's system thinking

Abstract This paper focuses on discussing Checkland's system thinking by two parts. The first part of the paper reviews three significant paradigm shifts of Checkland's system thinking in the view of the system movement. The first shift is that system thinking is developed from the general system thinking to applied systems thinking. The second shift is that the applied system thinking is transferred from Hard System Thinking (HST) to Soft System Thinking (SST). The third shift is that the social paradigm of applied system thinking is diverted from functionalism to the interpretive tradition for dealing with human affairs. According to these three shifts, this paper ascribes Checkland's system thinking to four core concepts: the human activity system, the purposeful holon, the learning system and two pairs of system concepts. It indicates that Checkland's system thinking is a significant milestone in the history of system movement. The second part of this paper provides some criticisms and suggestions for Checkland's system thinking. Firstly, it criticizes the philosophical attitude of extreme subjectivism. It implies that the functionalism approach which based on positivism and the interpretive paradigm which based on the phenomenology are complementary rather than mutually exclusive when we deal with the complexity of social reality. Secondly, it analyses the latest achievement of system movement after 1970s and suggests that SST should be extended to three pairs of system concepts by supplementing ‘self‐organization and adaptive evolution’ as the third pair of systems concepts. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.